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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

This can be better explained by demographics. The people who were in their 20s in the 2000s are now in their 40s and 50s and more conservative overall. If GenZ had control of the internet (which the GenXrs had) you wouldn't let your children and your grandma near it (and it would be a Good thing)

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Absolutely not, and I really find this summary kind of thinking dangerous. It's quite obviously "follow the money" and not "People, en masse, drastically and simplistically change their reactions to sex as they get older."

Now, back to my Facebook group of 40-50 year olds who trade dirty memes and use getting temp-banned as a jokey "sign-of-honor" :)

I hope i m wrong. But it's not the Z that controls the internet, their parents do and they are the ones that go along with 'protect the kids' crusades. Is discord or reddit sanitized? FB IG YT, everything is

I kind of feel like the controlling factor isn't "parents" or "kids" at all, really -- but "capitalist nanny state habits" that are weirdly re/distributed. Like, the radio is way "dirtier" than it used to be, you've got this odd flavor of "empowerment" that means female hypersexualization that's oddly not about the men at all, for better or worse.

Regardless, I don't feel like "active participation/commentary by this generation of older people" is a big factor?

> If GenZ had control of the internet you wouldn't let your children and your grandma near it

What do you mean by this? Zoomers are the new puritans not the previous generation

Calling individual generations “the new Puritans” makes this position all the more explicitly ridiculous.

Which generation is the new Huguenots?

Nah, it's a reasonable shorthand and more widely understood than "Huguenots."

The point was that there’s no consistent characterization that people have in mind for “new Puritans,” which makes it especially pointless to label an entire generation that way.

Just a small case in point: Gen Z is the most openly queer/non-traditional generation in US history. There are entire segments of our population that consider that nature to be sexually deviant and want to control it with social restrictions. So why are Gen Z the “puritans”?

I think it’s because they have a religious zeal about themselves generally speaking. An inquisition like air that permeates many aspects of culture they are involved in. fundamentalist attitudes abound and an inability to consider alternatives blended with a constant appeal to authority.

In essence, an extremely conformist and neurotic generation.

i d classify it more as 'fear'. There is a pervasive attitude that every space has to be 'safe' for everyone everywhere all the time. That's infantilizing, rather than radicalizing, and it s very prominent.

Or, alternatively, they’re passionate kids with priorities that are different from yours and you’re out of the loop.

I haven’t seen any evidence that they’re particularly conformist, or more neurotic than most people I’ve talked to. This comment in point: what’s more neurotic than saying that an entire generation has an “inquisition like air”?

Yes, zealots tend to be passionate. Passion isn’t by itself a good quality. Especially when you’ve acquired no wisdom at all.

I think they’re a group of people with too much knowledge but nearly no wisdom. They mistake knowledge for knowing something. Again, generally speaking.

I don’t think it’s their fault. We have infantilized them and never let them out of the cage. We were so scared of them failing that they’ve picked up on it and have packaged it as compulsive neuroticism. They’ve been overloaded with information from dubious sources for years now.

Saying that there’s a lot of great kids out there.

> Yes, zealots tend to be passionate. Passion isn’t by itself a good quality. Especially when you’ve acquired no wisdom at all.

Sure, but this is not a particularly new phenomenon. Nobody expects a generation of children and young adults (at the absolute oldest!) to be wise beyond their years. I'm in my mid-20s, and even I'm too old to be a Zoomer.

People accused Gen Xers of being coddled and "smart without being wise." They called them zealots when they burned their draft cards and tied themselves to trees, engaged in mass strikes, etc. Passion in young people is not new, and neither is "but this generation is different."

For what it's worth, I actually do agree that helicopter parenting (among other things) have a deleterious affect on kids. But that's a 40+ year old phenomenon, one that's not unique to gen Z. And of all the people I know online, Zoomers are the least susceptible to fake information (if only because so many of them are nihilistic).

I think you’re confusing Boomers with GenX. GenX is notorious for not caring and for slacking and for cynicism. It’s why there’s so many great comedians from that generation working today. Not much was taken too seriously. I’m sure some tied themselves to trees though but not group strikes.

GenX has very suspicious of group identity and “selling out”. A corporation pandering to their values would be mortifying. Very much the opposite of todays kids. Which makes sense as it’s their kids.

Yeah, I got things a little twisted. But the point stands: Boomers were originally lambasted for being soft and idealistic, as the first post-war generation. They’re now the ones, if we’re painting broad strokes, posting reactionary screeds about the younger generations.

> GenX has very suspicious of group identity and “selling out”.

The Pepsi Generation is suspicious of selling out?

Right? I'm 45 and I teach at a college and it feels like these kids are "less horny" to the point that it's unhealthy and unnatural.

Isnt this based on the assumption that what 'you'underwent in your 20s as natural and healthy? Maybe you are the outlier and others are natural and healthy.

Oh, generally speaking, I think they're a better generation than mine (I mean, I'm black, they're WAY more tolerant. So called "wokeness" is mostly a good thing). Kinder, more compassionate, etc.

But they "party" less? And it could absolutely be the case that they're content at home with videogames over Discord. I suppose there's something special about my 20's that -- hey, maybe they don't feel like they're missing anything at all -- but e.g. "incel" and "incel-adjacent" feels like it could be something that could be improved.

It’s worth considering that, at 45, you simply aren’t made aware of what college-aged people are doing.

One of my grandmas was in the Army during WWII. She served overseas.

My other grandma was a medical technician of some form in the Wehrmacht in Austria.

Maybe one day we'll end the fiction that old people don't know about pornography.

I think more plausible explanation is just plainly not many companies wanting to put their ads on porn, so hosting porn is significantly less lucrative per viewer than SFW content

how does that work for twitter ?

and then , i remember back in the days of TV there was soft porn or adult talk shows on TV late at night. They did have ads, and not the cheap kind (cigarettes, alcohol etc). TV was somewhat self-correcting, because kids are usually asleep past midnight so the ads matched content . On the internet it's nigh impossible to keep kids outside of content, so maybe that's a reason why adult content is unfundable and why the default for censorship is to make everything kid-safe. But maybe there is a way to make that work, i dont know

Probably worth noting that two of the most prominent advertisers on Tumblr even today are Adam and Eve (sex toys) and Manscaping (genital grooming). Also I still see plenty of what I'd consider porn via people abusing tags, though admittedly it's only at about the Penthouse/Hustler level. So some advertisers at least know that porn still exists on Tumblr, and actively try to tap that market. It must work, too, even though most Tumblrites are somewhere between eye-rolling and actively making them the butt of jokes.

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